Bernard Benstock was a fine American expert on James Joyce. After his early death, his wife gave his Joyce collection to the Scuola Superiore Interpreti e Traduttori at Forlì. This year another of his collections has been donated: nearly seven hundred volumes devoted to crime fiction. Last week, while we were commemorating him, someone asked why so many thinkers, critics, and scholars in general cultivate a passion for the detective story. Of course, those who have to read serious literature like to sit back in the evening with something more relaxing. But why do they often do so with such devotion? There are, I think, three reasons.
One is purely philosophical. The essence of the crime story is eminently metaphysical, and it’s no coincidence that the English call this kind of story a whodunit, which was the question that the pre-Socratics posed, and which we haven’t stopped asking. The five ways to demonstrate the existence of God, studied in the writing of Saint Thomas Aquinas, were also a masterpiece of crime investigation: with his nose to the ground like a truffle hound, he works from the evidence we find in the world of our existence back to the first beginning of the chain of causes and effects, or to the prime mover of all movements . . .
Except that we now know, from Kant on, that if working back from an effect to a cause is acceptable in the world of experience, the procedure becomes doubtful when working back from the world to something that is outside the world. And here comes the great metaphysical consolation provided by the crime story, where even the ultimate cause, and the hidden mover of all movements, is not outside the world of the story, but inside, and is part of it. And so, each evening, the crime story offers the consolation that we are denied by metaphysics, or much of it.
The second reason is scientific. Many people have shown that the investigation procedures used by Sherlock Holmes and his descendants are similar to those used in research, in both the natural and human sciences, where the quest is for the secret key to a text or the original forebear of a series of manuscripts. Holmes, who was notoriously ignorant about almost everything, wrongly described this activity, divinatory in appearance only, as “deduction,” while Charles Sanders Peirce called it “abduction,” and this, with a few differences, was also the logic of Karl Popper’s explanation.
Lastly, a literary reason. Ideally every text should be read twice, first to know what is said, second to appreciate how it is said, and from there to obtain the full aesthetic enjoyment. The crime story is a limited but exacting model of a text that, once you have discovered who the killer is, invites you implicitly or explicitly to look back, either to understand how the author has led you to build up false ideas, or to decide that after all he hadn’t hidden anything, only that you had failed to observe with the keen eye of the detective.
It’s a reading experience that entertains and at the same time offers metaphysical consolation, stimulates research, and provides a model for questioning far more impenetrable mysteries, and is therefore of valuable assistance in the Mission of the Scholar.
2001